A growing field of neuroscience research investigates the neural underpinnings of social cognition. In the last couple of years deep RL has entered this space, developing methods to train multiple agents in parallel in interesting multi-agent scenarios. This includes competitive team games, where individual agents must learn how to coordinate their actions [1]}, [2]}, cooperative games requiring difficult coordination [3]}, as well as thorny ‘social dilemmas,’ where short-sighted selfish actions must be weighed against cooperative behavior [4]}. The behavioral sciences have long studied such situations, and multi-agent deep RL offers new computational leverage on this area of research, up to and including the neural mechanisms underlying mental models of others, or ‘theory of mind’ [5]}, [6]}.
